Thankyou Kim, i will incorporate this into the memory banks from now on. When i got my original HS the guy in the shop was explaining the EXR advantage (I hadn't asked him, i wanted the camera anyway, but he insisted). He boiled it all down to pixel binning and the two is better than one mode, and that DR and SN mode used slightly different modes of that. This was in a professional photography shop, not PC World. So that's another one scrubbed off the ever dwindling list of 'reliable sources'. LOL

Thankyou for the information, which i shall read over again a couple of times in the next couple of days to make sure some of it sticks!

I still think resolution over DR has it uses sometimes. But that's just my opinion! LOL

You need to check your findings thoroughly though. I have found no situations in which an HR image looks better than a DR image upsized to match. But I have seem many situations where an HR image looks far worse than a DR image upsized to match.

So when you want a 12mp image on the 1/2" sensor, you are always better off shooting M size and upsizing them in photoshop.

Also remember that, to even come close to matching the quality in the two modes, you need to shoot at the same ISO. And the sensor is tiny, so you will want ISO 100. And because you have to use the same DR as ISO in L mode (no similar restriction in M mode), you end up with images with a lot of blocked shadows and blown highlights in L mode. That is a double whammy ...

Is EXR something which primarily benefits only smaller sensors? I see that Fuji doesn't use it on their larger sensors - is there a reason for that?